Whilewe all do our best to make sense of a world in which incessant change is the norm, marketers have an extra challenge; staying ahead of the tsunami of cultural, technological, political, and environmental transformations in order to satisfy the evolving needs of the audiences they want to attract.

With this challenge in mind, I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk to this year’s three Marketing Hall of Fame New York inductees, Lee Clow, Seth Godin, and Esther Lee. Each is being celebrated for their outstanding personal contributions to advancing the marketing industry, as well as for the insight and inspiration they continue to provide to the next generation of marketers.

Winning this honor is bestowed not as the result of a one-off initiative but, rather, for sustained achievement. What I wanted to explore in my conversations with these marketing legends was what it takes to drive long-term success, what has fueled their ability to stay on top year after year, in the face of unprecedented marketplace disruption.

What I learned was that while each honoree comes from a different discipline within the industry and possess a different set of skills, they share one critical attribute beyond their tenure in the field. They all recognize that marketing success for the long term is not the result of chasing the latest shiny new object, be it tools, tactics, or channels. Rather, it’s being able to quickly and adeptly assess the changes at play at a specific moment in time to build a simple, honest, human connection between brand and consumer.

“I’m being inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame and, technically, I’m an advertising person,” Clow told me during our conversation. “I’m very proud of the fact that I have worked with and helped create brands as a total marketing experience, not just making advertising for them. The people who can find the simple, honest human connections in their brand building are the ones who will be most successful.

The good creative people are the ones who have a particular ability to touch some human truth. Even in the midst of all the new media, you have to put something out there that resonates with consumers. In this transparent, interactive world we live in, the audience has the right to give you a thumbs up or thumbs down.”

Asking Clow about his time with Steve Jobs and the award-winning work which help make Apple an icon, he said, “It was rewarding to feel like your responsibility was to keep tabs on where the world was going, drawing from that understanding to tap into something relevant that connects with people. You have to find the emotional center of a brand and once you do it becomes kind of like your ‘true north.’

Knowing ‘who’ you are as a brand versus ‘what you do’ is a critical way to manage rapid change. At Apple, it was the litmus test of knowing exactly where we were going. Lots of things may change, but keeping your eye on true north keeps you pointed in the right direction for the brand. It gives you the ability to look at any marketing gesture and say, ‘Hey, that isn’t true to where we’re going, who we want to be, who we are.’”

Godin, best-selling author and former dot com business executive, has also spent a good part of his career assessing the importance of the “who we are,” not “what we do,” factor when it comes to maintaining brand credibility and connectivity with consumers. Or, as he wrote on a recent blog, “The web is littered with easy promises.” During our conversation, he told me, “You have to be prepared to be on the hook. You have to make a clear, simple promise and be willing to be held responsible for this promise year after year. Marketing continues to be not about you, or your product, it’s about them. You need to focus on ideas that resonate with humanity. While everyone is running after the next thing, thinking they’re onto what’s next, I like to focus on the thing that’s hiding in plain sight, something right in front of us, and explain why it’s happening and the implications for the future. If something is working, I need to have a thesis as to why. If you don’t have an explanation, than you can’t pretend to understand marketing and the human dynamic or behavior.”

With a career trajectory that has included major roles and major successes in global advertising, branding strategy, and marketing, Esther Lee has a multidimensional perspective on how to position a company for long-term growth. “The tools we use have always changed,” she said in our discussion. “Businesses are changing. Companies are facing the same disruptions in emerging technologies, societal change, economic and regulatory change.

That said, the fundamental role of marketing within a business has remained constant. It’s evergreen. Brands and marketing remain the emotional meeting ground between a company and its customers. The truth that I’ve always seen, whether it’s been working in advertising or on a whole go-to-market solution, is that the key to marketing is really understanding the fundamental hopes, fears, and dreams of customers and figuring out how to successfully navigate the internal business conversation to elevate the customer in the consideration of everything we do. So you have a north star, a framework within which to operate, even though the ingredients may change. Relative to the speed of change, our job today is to get insights faster, to connect the dots more quickly in order to deliver what our customers need.”

The world is only going to continue to change with unprecedented speed. This means that marketers today – and those in future generations – would be well served by heeding the insight and inspiration of Clow, Godin, and Lee. What these new inductees into the Marketing Hall of Fame recognize is that even though the “ingredients” may change, that myriad factors will shift and fluctuate, one thing is constant when it comes to ongoing marketing success. Whether it’s achieved by identifying an “emotional center,” or an “emotional meeting ground,” the simple secret to success is the ability to forge a human connection. To do this year in and year out means keeping a laser focus on the customer.

For more perspective about how brands are staying relevant in our fast-changing world, check out my new book, Shift Ahead or Metaforce

I am the cofounder of Metaforce (Metaforce.co) and an expert in all disciplines of brand. My latest book is Shift Ahead: How the Best Companies Stay Relevant in a Fast-Changing World (shiftaheadbook.com). Most recently I was Chairman, North America of Landor Associates, a...